Little Bee

By Chris Cleave

(Simon & Schuster; 271 pages; $24)

Authors have a choice about the narrators of their novels: They can stick to what they know, or they can self-efface behind someone else. The first can be more real, but also risks being less interesting. The second can transport you, or it can ring decidedly false.

Chris Cleave is a white columnist who lives with his wife and young children in London and whose second novel, "Little Bee," is narrated by two women. One is a white London columnist and editor with a young son; the other is a young Nigerian refugee escaping an immigration removal center in the United Kingdom.

The women's worlds collided on a beach in Nigeria, some time before the book takes place. The Nigerian teen, who renames herself "Little Bee," was on the run with her beautiful older sister, Kindness. The London lady, Sarah, was vacationing with her husband, Andrew. Bad things, unsurprisingly, happen, and both women's lives were irrevocably altered.

These catalyzing events eventually bring the women back together, as Little Bee tries to track down the only British citizens she knows. Each woman relives her memories, and the past bleeds into the present. Sarah must decide how much of her life she can give up to save Little Bee's.

The book's intentions appear honorable. It is anti-complaisant, bemoaning the normality of the First World in the face of the horrors of the Third. It is a novel about the borders we draw, and the real damage they inflict. To be human, it argues, is to remain permeable and compassionate; to be humane, as a country, is to be collectively the same.

The problem is the narrators, and the speed with which events unfurl. At times, both voices ring true. Little Bee sounds young and funny; Sarah sounds witty and maternal. They both, for the most part, sound like real people, although this is more often the case with Sarah, whose life, one suspects, isn't so different from Cleave's own. But two consistent problems recur: Cleave gets too caught up in creating voices, and he rushes the pace with which the story occurs.

The characters speak with too many quirks: Little Bee waxes poetic, and Sarah's toddler Charlie has problems with his verbs. Charlie says things like "is you getting" and "mine daddy," instead of "are you getting" and "my daddy." This may be how a toddler talks, but it sounds affected, not endearing, when it's written down.

Instead of allowing his characters time to process the already heavy events that spur the novel's start, Cleave inundates them with new happenings, and rushes the plot along. The effect is too fast, too easy and too plain. What could have been heartrending dilemmas feel like foregone conclusions instead.

There is also an ethical question here: When a white male author writes as a young Nigerian girl, is it an act of empathy, or identity theft? When an author pretends to be someone he is not, he does it to tell a story outside of his own experiential range. But he has to in turn be careful that he is representing his characters, not using them for his plot. This is not to say that such lines of identity should never be crossed; authors have been doing it for centuries, often to great effect. It's just that special care should be taken with a story that's not implicitly yours to tell. In the case of Little Bee, Cleave may not have been careful enough. Sometimes she's not convincing, and sometimes she tries too hard to convince. It's too often apparent that Little Bee is not real. This doesn't do justice to her story, and puts the burden back on the author to show that he's representing her, rather than exploiting her.

In telling a story about the permeability of borders, both emotional and real, Cleave pushes his own boundaries maybe further than they were meant to go. There are stories out there that demand to be told, but an author has to know whether he's the one that should do the telling.